It's not really the 'quiet' part, honestly; with Hamas, advertising your evil is the out-loud part. Still, it's very important to highlight this Wall Street Journal scoop, which reports out the appalling and inhumane internal calculus of Hamas' top military leader -- Yahya Sinwar -- who planned the October 7th massacre. Sinwar is a fanatical supporter of Israeli civilian casualties, of course, and would kill every last Jew in the region if he could. That should go without saying. But he also explicitly advocates Palestinian civilian casualties as a strategy, referring to the innocent Gazans he deliberately places in harm's way as worthy "sacrifices" for the cause of turning world opinion against Israel, and thus ensuring the survival of his terrorist organization. Those aren't the words of his critics. They're his own words. The Journal's headline is, "Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas." Civilian bloodshed. Will help Hamas. Yes, it's as disgusting as it sounds:
For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting—and more Palestinian civilian deaths—work to his advantage. “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials. In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar...In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.”
Israel takes great, historically-unprecedented pains to avoid the collateral damage of civilian casualties in Gaza. Hamas' leader, by contrast, is committed to a strategy of increasing them. Proudly. Hamas lies constantly about the numbers and demographics of alleged "civilain" deaths inflicted by Israelis in this war that Hamas started with a vast slaughter of Jews late last year. But it's undeniable that a signfiicant number of civilians, including children, have been killed. For Sinwar, that's by design. When kids die in this war, Sinwar sees them as "necessary sacrifices." And every single person who goes along with his diabolically heinous plan by blaming Israel for the deaths that Hamas ensures, in a war Hamas started, is rewarding the terrorists. Imagine knowing this is how Hamas plans to maintain its grip on power, and actively helping them in that pursuit. It's unconscionable. Ultimately, Sinwar's goal "appears to be to win a permanent cease-fire that allows Hamas to declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel and claim leadership of the Palestinian national cause," according to the story. It should therefore come as no surprise that Sinwar and his band of murderous savages have rejected yet another ceasefire 'deal:'
🚨🚨BREAKING: Israeli official tells me: Israel received Hamas' response. Hamas rejected the proposal for a hostage deal, which was laid out by President Biden in his speech
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) June 11, 2024
Much like I have lost all patience for media outlets that continue to credulously report Hamas-furnished death tolls, I have lost all patience for "diplomats" (and sitting presidents desperately clinging to power) who continue to treat these bad-faith, openly genocidal zealots like they're constructive negotiating partners. Enough of this madness:
BREAKING: Blinken: Hamas asked for changes in the hostage deal proposal - some are workable and some are unworkable. Hamas could have replied with one word - yes. Instead they presented more changes - some of them go further than their previous positions
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) June 12, 2024
Let's be brutally candid: Joe Biden is worried about losing Michigan, so he has tied Israel's hands with threats and worse, in order to prevent them from actually winning this entirely justified, righteous, defensive war of their enemy's choosing. Team Biden is currently trying to push a terrible "deal" that would allow Hamas to survive, and would require the Israelis to release Palestinian terrorist prisoners in exchange for innocent civilian hostages. This is not an even 'swap,' to say the least -- convicted terrorists for civilians. Think, for a moment, about the incentives here. Hamas starts a war with an unprovoked attack that kills more Jews than in any single day since the Holocaust. They boast about their intent to inflict more similar attacks, unceasingly. They reject peace deals. They refuse to release the hostages they stole. They intentionally embed their operations among their own civilians, in order to maximize those types of casualties in the war they catalyzed. And the international community endlessly pressures...their victims, and offers Hamas an escape hatch, with a bunch of liberated terrorists as an added bonus. And that's still not good enough for Hamas. The Israelis surely aren't too eager to release yet more terrorists from their custody because they've been badly burned by this in the past. Here is a case-in-point that seems, well, highly relevant to this discussion:
Even in that first moment [on October 7th], Dr. [Yuval] Bitton says, he knew with certainty who had masterminded the attack: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and Inmate No. 7333335 in the Israeli prison system from 1989 until his release in a prisoner swap in 2011...Dr. Bitton had a history with Yahya Sinwar. As he watched the images of terror and death flicker across his screen, he was tormented by a decision he had made nearly two decades before — how, working in a prison infirmary, he had come to the aid of a mysteriously and desperately ill Mr. Sinwar, and how afterward the Hamas leader had told him that “he owed me his life.”...The day he saved Yahya Sinwar’s life, Yuval Bitton was 37, running the dental clinic at the Beersheba prison complex, in the Negev desert of southern Israel. In an interrogation after his arrest in 1988, [Sinwar] dispassionately described shooting one man, strangling another with his bare hands, suffocating a third with a kaffiyeh, and choking and punching a fourth before tossing him in a hastily dug grave.
Records of the interrogation make clear that, far from being remorseful, Mr. Sinwar saw beating confessions out of the collaborators as a righteous duty. One of them, he told interrogators, had even said that “he realized he deserved to die.” Mr. Sinwar continued his campaign against informants from behind bars. Israeli authorities believed he had ordered the beheadings of at least two prisoners he suspected of snitching...he found ways to plot against Israel with Hamas leaders on the outside, managing the smuggling of cellphones into the prison and using lawyers and visitors to ferry messages out. Often, the message was about finding ways to kidnap Israeli soldiers to trade for Palestinian prisoners. Years later, Mr. Sinwar would say that “for the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him.”
And guess what? Sinwar himself helped negotiate an agreement that forced Israel to release more than 1,000 convicted Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single kidnapped Israeli soldier. Sinwar wasn't satisfied with this lopsided achievement, accomplished through barbarity, but he walked free as a result of it. And then his thugs kidnapped this very same doctor's nephew during last fall's attack -- the loved one of the Jewish doctor who saved his life. And now the Israelis are indirectly negotiating with this monster again. Will they, under pressure from Biden, release the architect of the next October 7th as a part of whatever concessions they may feel compelled to offer? I'll leave you with this passage from the New York Times piece quoted above, which speaks for itself -- describing the doctor's conversations with Sinwar, prior to his release:
Was there no chance, then, for a two-state solution? Dr. Bitton would press him.
Never, Mr. Sinwar would say. Why not? Dr. Bitton would respond.
Because this is the land of Muslims, not for you.
Negotiating with these bloodthirsty zealots meets the definition of insanity. And I can't help sharing the sentiment of a woman who confronted Bitton after the slaughter: "Sitting together in a cafe in Eilat, a town on the Red Sea where the survivors of Nir Oz were first relocated, brother and sister were approached by a stranger. The woman fixed her gaze on Dr. Bitton, apparently recognizing him from his interview on TV. She had a question. 'Why did you save him?' she asked. 'Why?'"
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